NVIDIA GeForce2 MX

No surprises here, the GeForce 2 MX continues to slightly outperform the the GeForce SDR, but fall slightly behind the DDR models in 32-bit color. Those 32-bit scores are not horrible by any means, however, as the MX is faster in 32-bit color than most cards in 16-bit color. Thank NVIDIA's T&L unit for keeping these cards on top in 640x480.

The ATI cards take a major hit in 32-bit with Quaver. We initially thought it might be due to the lack of texture compression support under OpenGL, but the TNT2 and G400 do not have this benefit either and maintain their composure.

The results are basically the same here, but the effects of memory bandwidth limitations are more apparent as the discrepancy between 16-bit and 32-bit modes widens. Quaver at 800x600x32 is one of the few benchmarks in which the GeForce SDR is able to beat out the GeForce 2 MX. The difference is fairly small, however, and the GeForce 2 MX in 32-bit remains faster than most cards in 16-bit.

Once again, GeForce 2 MX performance is just ahead of the GeForce SDR, which means it falls quite a bit behind its DDR-based counterparts. The Voodoo5 is finally able to catch up to, and even surpass, the GeForce 2 MX and GeForce SDR in 32-bit mode.

At 1024x768, we begin to see the devastating effects of the texture-heavy Quaver demo. The cards with texture compression support are able to cope with 32-bit color reasonably well here, but those without begin to take a major hit. Interestingly, the single chip Rage 128 Pro is faster than the dual chip, most likely due to the fact that AGP texturing is disabled on the dual chip MAXX.

The Voodoo4/5, NVIDIA GeForce, and Viper II (Savage 2000) all have texturing compression under OpenGL that ensures that texture swapping is not an issue.